Broun, Hale, "Is It Better to Be Shaft Than Uncle Tom?" in
New
York Times
, 26 August 1973.

Peavy, Charles, "Black Consciousness and the Contemporary
Cinema," in
Popular Culture and the Expanding Consciousness
, edited by Ray Browne, New York, 1973.

* * *

In 1970, Melvin Van Peebles—along with Gordon Parks and Ossie
Davis, one of the first African-American filmmakers to find work in
Hollywood—directed a moderately successful serio-comedy entitled
Watermelon Man
, about a white bigot who suddenly finds himself in the body of a black
man. With the $70,000 he earned from that film, plus additional funds from
a number of independent sources (including a $50,000 emergency loan from
Bill Cosby), Van Peebles was able to finance his new project,
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
—so named in order to solicit at least a modicum of coverage from
the mainstream media. Desperate to keep production costs to a minimum, he
signed a deal with Cinemation Industries, a small distributor specializing
in low-budget exploitation fare, and pretended to be making a porno flick,
a move which enabled him to hire black and nonunion crewmen. In addition,
Van Peebles wrote, directed, scored, and starred in the film, which was
not only a sound decision economically, but one which ensured his creative
control over every facet of production. Early in 1971,
Sweetback
opened in the only two theaters (in Detroit and Atlanta) that would agree
to show it on a first-run basis. By the end of the year, the film had
become the most profitable independent production in history to that
point; a sleeper hit across the nation, it would wind up grossing over $15
million.

On the one hand,
Sweetback
is a film so original in both conception and realization that it managed
to defy all traditional genre expectations, thereby satisfying the desire
(at least temporarily) for a popular alternative to the dominant Hollywood
paradigm. On the other hand,
Sweetback
is a film that borrows narrative threads and conventions from an
assortment of different genres (including the chase film, the biker film,
and soft-core porno), thereby proving itself a forerunner of those
"postmodern" hybrids so prevalent in theaters today.
Finally,
Sweetback
is a film whose staggering and completely unexpected commercial success
ensured its place at the head of an explosion in black-marketed,
black-cast, and/or black-directed productions, an explosion that soon went
by the ambivalent name of "Blaxploitation cinema."

Sweetback
makes manifest its revolutionary pretensions with the following words,
which appear at the bottom of the screen before the opening credits role:
"This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who have
had enough of the Man." The shocking first scene finds a pre-teen
Sweetback (played by Melvin's son, Mario Van Peebles) working in a
whorehouse, where a grateful call-girl screams out his nickname during
orgasm. Though some viewers found symbolic beauty here (Black Panther
leader Huey Newton went so far as to claim that the woman "in fact
baptizes [Sweetback] into his true manhood"), others in the
African-American community, such as
Ebony
reviewer Lerone Bennett, Jr., felt that Sweetback's initiation is
not so much an "act of love" as "the rape of a child
by a 40-year-old prostitute." We next observe (the now grown-up)
Sweetback performing as a stud in a black-run sex show in South-Central
Los Angeles. On his way to a police station, where he is scheduled to
stand in temporarily as a suspect in a widely-publicized murder case, his
two guards stop to detain a black activist (Moo Moo, played by Hubert
Scales) and proceed to beat the young man senseless. Having seen
enough/too much, Sweetback jumps the officers, and nearly kills them with
his handcuffs. The rest of the movie tracks our hero's progress as
he rides, runs, and hitches his way through decaying cityscapes in a
desperate effort at avoiding capture. At one point, Sweetback has his life
threatened by a motorcycle gang, and only manages to survive by winning a
public sex duel with the female leader. And that is just the beginning; as
Ed Guerrero describes it, Sweetback "evades the police by raping a
Black woman at knifepoint at a rock concert, spears a cop with a pool cue,
kills a number of dogs tracking him, heals himself with his own urine, and
bites off the head of a lizard before escaping across the Mexicn border
into the desert." The film concludes on an ominous note for white
audiences, as the words "A Baadasssss nigger is coming to collect
some dues" flash across the screen.

Although neither the popularity of
Sweetback
at the time of its release, nor its influence on future black filmmakers,
can possibly be denied, its legacy—as well as that of
Blaxploitation cinema generally— remains a matter of controversy to
this day. In interviews, as well as in the promotional book accompanying
its theatrical release, Van Peebles called the film
"revolutionary," as it tells the story of a "bad
nigger" who mounts a successful challenge against the oppressive
white power system. This view was supported by Newton, who devoted an
entire issue of the Black Panther party newspaper to
Sweetback.
Bill Cosby has reportedly called the film a work of genius. And a number
of African-American intellectuals sought to add Sweetback's name to
the roll call of black folkloric heroes in virtue of his prodigious
virility. On the negative side, Bennett argued in a scathing review that
the film serves to romanticize the poverty and wretchedness of the ghetto,
that Sweetback is a self-serving, apolitical individualist rather than a
revolutionary, and that the protagonist's sexploitative
construction actually reinforces negative African-American male
stereotypes. These criticisms were seconded by, among others, Black
nationalist author and poet Haki R. Madhubuti.

Unfortunately, what tends to get lost in the heated debates surrounding
Sweetback
's socio-political "message" is an acknowledgment and
consideration of Van Peeble's innovative directorial style. By
making creative use of such techniques as montage, superimposition, freeze
frames, jump cuts, zoom-ins, split-screen editing, stylized dialogue,
multiply-exposed scenes, and a soulful musical score by the black rock
group Earth Wind and Fire, Van Peebles broke new ground and challenged
viewers' expectations. All of this should make obvious the point
that
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
is not just a statement, protest, or historical oddity, but a unique
cinematic experience for people of all colors to reflect upon, appreciate,
and enjoy.

—Steven Schneider

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: